This volume honours the work of Abdul-Karim Rafeq, the foremost historian of Ottoman Syria. Rafeq's principal contribution to the study of the social history of Syria between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries lies in his pioneering use of the resources of the Islamic court records, the sijillāt in the maḥkama al-sharʿiyya, for the writing of social and economic history. Rafeq has been the guide and mentor of many of his own contemporaries, as well as of younger scholars in the Arab world, Europe and North America. The volume attempts to follow and complement...

As the attention of the world is focused on the increasingly beleaguered U.S. and U.K. occupation of Iraq, Iraq expert and Middle East historian Peter Sluglett revisits Britain's creation of Iraq in the twentieth century in this thoroughly revised edition of his classic text 'Britain in Iraq'.

Violent non-state actors have become almost endemic to political movements in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. This book examines why they play such a key role and the different ways in which they have developed. Placing them in the context of the region, separate chapters cover the organizations that are currently active, including: The Muslim Brotherhood, The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, Hamas, Hizbullah, the PKK, al-Shabab and the Huthis. The book shows that while these groups are a new phenomenon, they also relate to other key factors including the...